Zeppelin, 70, the guy widely credited for pioneering LoDo and the Golden Triangle, doesn’t do subdivisions, cookie-cutter apartment building or beige-box office parks for dentists. Forget about parking lots.

He shoots for lifestyle. He talks about vision.

“A push for having a culture of creativity,” says Mickey, describing what’s behind his projects. “An environment in which people are empowered to be creative. I think that’s what the places I’ve been involved with are about. It’s certainly Taxi.”

That 550-foot-long building near what was once the Yellow Cab headquarters is the second phase of Taxi, the most challenging project of his career. Mickey calls it a “landscraper” because instead of rising tall and skinny into the heavens like a skyscraper, it stretches long and thin along the ground, with office space, an organic cafe and an exercise facility on the ground and second floors, and residences on the third floor.

It’s unique in Denver, Mickey’s riff on ventures he encountered in Amsterdam and other Northern European cities.

Developers in these places transformed industrial docks and wharves into cool hives for artists, creative professionals, residents and families. They hinge, in part, on culture – art, music, politics, food – and that’s Mickey’s dream for Taxi: an oasis of culture in an industrial setting.

That’s the dream. The reality? For one thing, Taxi is an expensive experiment.

What happens if you buy 15 acres along a forlorn street with nothing around but train tracks, factories, derelict buildings, weeds and trash? What happens if you stand on the property and hear little more than coal-hauling trains sounding their glum trumpets over the slow CLACKety-CLACKety-CLACKety; the sharp whines and hoarse rumbles of tractor-trailers; the low roar of concrete trucks in low gear?

What happens when you look east, squinting for the morning sun, and everything dazzles because of the nearby junkyard, the cars stacked like lounge chairs?

What happens when you stick a landscraper into that landscape? People move in.

Joining the village

Pam Hanes, 62, bought a place because she envisions Taxi as a “colony of people who share the embrace of creativity in living and working, and who will make Taxi an exceptionable place to be.”

Ted Pearlman, 38, started the Locomotive project at Taxi, a first-of-its-kind urban co-housing development. If all moves forward as planned, by 2009 the project will have families living in nearly 30 units.

“To Mickey’s credit, he’s committed to the idea of having a full-fledged village up at Taxi, and that includes families,” Pearlman says.

The Locomotive residents will live in a six-story building separate from the landscraper. It will be the tallest co-housing structure in North America. There will be gardens on the roof, community kitchens and common areas and gardens sprinkled around the Taxi property.

Denver lawyer John Oppenheim, 54, is moving his business to Taxi for stimulation.

“I went out there very early in the process, and I said, ‘Lawyer? Taxi?’ And I said this is wrong for me, this doesn’t make any sense for a lawyer.”

But he kept going back, and talking with Mickey, and something clicked.

“The Taxi site feels like America, with the train going by,” he says. “It feels unspoiled, although it’s not a natural setting. The whole thing is a sense of adventure, like the Wild West.”

Mickey has a knack for finding the wild and unpolished and turning it into something else. LoDo was in disrepair in the middle of the 1980s when Mickey started buying real estate there. He opened City Spirit Cafe, in the 1400 block of Blake Street, and it became the cultural heart of the neighborhood.

He moved into the Golden Triangle when it had little more going on than desolation, and now it’s thriving and forested with new condo complexes.

He’s had some setbacks, most notably his tumultuous and frustrating effort to build Greenhouse, a multifamily project in Cherry Creek.

Overcoming the odds

And just months ago, the Taxi project suddenly faced a potentially fatal setback, when lenders pulled out of the deal.

But he pushed, found new lenders, and people are set to move into the structure next month.

“The project was 20 percent complete, a big metal frame out there. Failure was not an option,” says Kyle, 34.

Mickey “worked it until it happened,” says Kyle. “That’s what motivates us: a refusal to not succeed. He sets the example on that.”

It’s the Mickey example that Kyle, who worked as a lawyer for about a year before joining with his dad, has followed closely.

Mickey thinks big picture and is somewhat of a genius for drumming up money and doing marketing. Kyle, a tall, slim guy with a laconic manner, likes to muck around in the details.

When Mickey broke his leg skiing in Breckenridge this winter, Kyle took over the Taxi project.

Differences between them have emerged.

Mickey, says Kyle, “articulates a vision, and he puts a team around him that makes it a reality. My approach may be more democratic and decentralized. I’m also surrounding myself with people with vision. People are not totally subordinate to the things I want to do.”

He added: “That’s what will bridge the generations. If it’s just everything begins and ends with Mickey and his vision, it’s not going to survive that transition.”

Mickey wears bright red socks and colorful sport coats and shirts. Architecture books, art, corkboards festooned with thumbtacked notes and pictures of architectural projects around the world fill his office.

He speaks softly, and he’s not a grinning, back-slapping, sports-bar kind of guy. He’s been with his partner, artist Susan Wick, for nearly three decades. They never married.

He’s a hippie, a curious intellectual type, although he should not be confused with an absent-minded dreamer. He’s made his money buying property, building stuff on the land and selling it. He’s got a tough edge to him.

There is no doubt, though, that he’s a different kind of developer. Most of his projects have been urban gambles, not suburban sure-things. Fledgling Zeppelin projects cause others to scratch their heads.

“We brought a group of Realtors here, and they said, ‘What are you doing? This is insane,”‘ says Mickey. “I thought they would be excited about it.”

Mickey, who says he is the grandson of a “junkman,” says his approach to development parallels his grandfather.

“I’m always looking for things that people didn’t see or didn’t think was great,” he says. “That’s part of the whole process. This is looking for opportunities that people don’t see.”

Mickey Zeppelin rarely flirts with the conventional. His motto, after all, is “Don’t create boring things.”

The Taxi project stands as his least traditional effort yet, from the development itself to the very way he went about it.

To wit: He summoned four prominent architects to a room in his funky offices in an old Yellow Taxi terminal and said: “Go.”

Over a year and a half, the architects met in different locations and communicated constantly with Mickey and his son, Kyle, about the project.

It was costly. The architects didn’t always agree. Tempers simmered and sometimes boiled over. At times the project seemed like a rudderless ship, its sails torn. Just bobbing.

But the group, eventually led by Phoenix architect Will Bruder, developed the “landscraper” concept, which led to plans for the third phase of Taxi, which includes the co-housing building and other structures and tracts of open space.

If it all gets built, Taxi could go from a big blank spot in the middle of industria to big community of artists, businesspeople and families.

“(Mickey’s) route from beginning to end is more circuitous than most developers,” says Eldorado Springs architect Alan Brown, who has worked with Zeppelin on several projects, including Taxi. “In some cases, it’s more interesting. In some cases it’s baffling. In some cases it’s confusing or disrupting.”

Bruder, too, champions Zeppelin’s approach. “It’s a complex way to go somewhere, but it often brings interesting results that you wouldn’t get from single authorship. Mickey, without any fear, is plumbing this wonderful site next to the Platte River in a unique way to offer an alternative to Stapleton, which is becoming the status quo.

“I think Taxi will be a standout example of how to think about density and life in the reconstruction of a city.”

Tour the Taxi

Phase one of Taxi, the former Yellow Cab garage, 3455 Ringsby Court, is included on the self- guided Open Doors Denver tour, 10 a.m.-4 p.m. today. For a guide to Open Doors Denver, visit Union Station, in LoDo or Denvergov.org.

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